Tuesday, 31 December 2013

And thanks to everyone who contributed genuinely to the 153000+ hits this site has had in 2013. I say 'genuinely' because perusal of the analytics of this site's traffic sources reveals hits directed here from - shall we say? - special interest sites. I don't understand this internet thing so I don't know how this happened - I'm bemused as to how this site could be of interest to perusers of sites featuring, ahem, scantily-clad women but there we are.

Wednesday, 18 December 2013

[This is the first part of my chapter for the Cambridge Archaeology of Late Antiquity on 'The peoples of northern Europe', which means an attempt to summarise the archaeology of Ireland, northern Britain, Germany and Scandinavia between about 300 and about 650, discuss interpretations of this data and their problems and suggest some new conclusions.]

Introduction

Late antique studies rarely
encompass the barbarians who lived beyond the Rhine and Hadrian’s Wall; even the
applicability of the term ‘Late Antiquity’ to some regions under discussion has
been debated.[1]Much of the ‘late antique problematic’ has
concerned specific issues of long-term Roman socio-cultural continuity; it has
tended to focus on the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean; and
it has frequently dwelt upon especially Christian religious topics best
confronted via written sources, largely absent beyond the limites before the seventh century.Yet there are powerful reasons to include northern barbaricum within a late antique archaeology.Exclusion perpetuates the idea that Romans
and barbarians lived in separate, opposed worlds.This notion must be questioned if we are not
to render rather hollow a key founding principle of late antique studies, that
the ‘decline and fall’ of the Western Empire should not be seen as marking a chasm
within European history.An examination
of the peoples north of the imperial frontiers allows us to explore the extent
to which the West’s political demise was (or was not) a dramatic shift, and
why.Even histories written within the
traditional ‘decline and fall’ paradigm have tended to ignore these northerners.[2]Discussion usually ends once the barbarians
have migrated, foreclosing any understanding of migration’s causes and
mechanisms.Relations between Rome and
the regions beyond Hadrian’s Wall and the Rhine could be intimate or sporadic
but the Empire remained an important presence.The Western Empire’s fifth-century disintegration therefore affected
different areas in varying ways.Nonetheless,
in this survey of these ‘barbarians’ between the start of the fourth century
and the middle of the seventh, we will see that change was dynamic throughout
Late Antiquity, not just in the dramatic fifth century.

Political Geography

The principal late antique political
development among the northern peoples was the third-century appearance of
larger confederacies along the imperial limites.On the lower Rhine frontier the Franks emerged,
their name probably meaning something like ‘Fierce People’.This grouping presumably incorporated the Sicambri,
Bructeri, Chattuarii (recorded well into the early middle ages, who may be
related to the Chatti) and Chamavi reported by earlier historians and
ethnographers.Whether there were two
Frankish confederacies, on the Lower and Middle Rhine, seems debatable at this
date; the Ripuarian (river-dwelling) Franks are not attested as such until the
seventh century, though the Romans certainly referred to the Franks closest to
the sea as Salii (‘Salty’ Franks).In the angle left by Roman withdrawal from
the Upper Rhine and Danube agri decimates,
the Alamanni – ‘All-Men’ – emerged.The
relationships between this group and the earlier Suebi and any link between its
formation and migrations from northern Germania
are again debatable.[3]More recent interpretations see an active
Roman role in this confederacy’s formation within the abandoned provinces.The third new group in Germania Magna was that of the Saxons, the first certain reference
to whom comes, again, in the third century.The Saxons incorporated the Anglii (Angles), Eucii (Jutes) and Frisii
attested by the early imperial writers.[4]

Behind these new confederacies
were other Germanic-speaking barbari:
the Burgundians, the Vandals and the Lombards, whose initial location is unclear.By the later fourth century the Burgundians bordered
the Alamanni to the east; the Lombards spread their power along the Elbe; and,
by the early fifth century, there were Vandals close enough to the Rhine for them
to be driven across that river by the fall-out from the establishment of Hunnic
hegemony in the Carpathian basin.A
group of Sueves accompanied the Vandals in that migration.Who they were is problematic.Like the Vandals, Burgundians and Lombards,
they bear a name recorded by early Roman geographers, which may be significant.
They possibly represent an Alamannic
faction (with whom the name Suevi is sometimes associated). Between these groups and the Danube frontier,
where Sarmatians, Goths and later Huns were to be found, in the fourth century we
catch the last glimpses of the Marcomanni (‘Border Men’), once a great and
threatening confederacy, and the Quadi.By
the late fifth century, these had been replaced by equally shadowy groups:
Skiri, Rugi, Juthungi, Gepids and Heruls.[5]The Heruls are particularly interesting,
appearing in and around the Bay of Biscay as well as on the Danube in the fifth
century, serving the Byzantine Empire in the sixth and apparently still
retaining contact with groups based in Jutland.[6]The distribution of these peoples is
noteworthy.The new confederacies are
located on the imperial frontiers (counting the North Sea as a frontier)
whereas the peoples in the band behind have names attested since early imperial
times (though one should not necessarily assume a direct a linkage).

During the fifth century, the Elbe
valley fell under the sway of a newly-emergent confederacy, the Thuringians,
while Jutland and neighbouring islands may have been taken over by the Danes,
first mentioned in sixth-century historical sources.[7]Otherwise, little is known of Scandinavian
political geography.The Bavarians, another
new people, come into view in the late sixth and seventh centuries, around the
upper Danube.[8]

North of Hadrian’s Wall, picti appear in the sources.Whether their name is a genuine ethnonym or a
simple Latin description (‘the painted Men’) is unknown.Irish sources call the seventh-century Picts ‘Cruithne’,
a Q-Celtic rendition of a word like ‘Pritani’ (Britons), but this is difficult
to push back into the fourth century.Back-projection
from the ‘early historic’ period bedevils popular conceptions of the
Picts.Ammianus claims there were two principal
groups of Picti: Verturiones and Dicalydones.Once believed to have been located around
Strathearn, the bases of the Verturionesmay
instead have been further north, towards the Tay, where Anglo-Saxon sources
later mention people with a similar name.If, as seems plausible, the Dicalydones may be linked to the earlier Caledonii,
place-names suggest that their core lands probably lay north and west of the
Forth estuary.[9]We are traditionally accustomed to populating
the region between the Hadrianic and Antonine Walls with groups described as
‘British’: Votadini, Selgovae and so on.These peoples, attested by early Roman geographers, also show up in
place-names and sometimes reappear in the post-imperial era.The Votadini are the Gododdin, for example,
and the Maetae are probably the Miathi mentioned in Adomnán’s Life of Columba.[10]However, Roman sources refer to all people
north of Hadrian’s Wall as picti. It seems most plausible to propose that, as in
Germania, a new confederacy had
emerged, incorporating earlier, smaller units.[11]The core lands of the southern Dicalydones
may have lain around the Forth but their confederacy stretched as far south as
the Wall.From around 600 we can
perceive a Pictish kingdom (perhaps two) north of the Forth (now certainly styling
themselves Picti) and an emerging
Scottish kingdom in Argyle.The latter straddled
the North Channel; its principal royal dynasty, the Dal Riata, also competed
for the overkingship of the Ulaid (see below).Between the Forth-Clyde line and Hadrian’s Wall we can now detect some
small kingdoms (such as the Gododdin) claiming a British identity.By the mid-seventh century those on the east
had been conquered by Anglo-Saxon Bernicia, while a British kingdom based upon
Dumbarton, sometimes referred to as Strathclyde, encompassed the western
regions.[12]

Irish politics are difficult to
establish without written accounts.Early Roman geographers had given detailed accounts of Ireland’s rivers
and numerous peoples but it is usually thought that in the late Roman period
large, if loose, political units existed, possibly those referred to in later
Irish legendary material.By the end of
our period, however, Irish politics had taken on the contours they were to
retain throughout the remainder of the first millennium.The southern region later known as Munster
(Mumu or the Kingdom of Cashel) formed a confederacy, the leadership of which
was fought over by various branches of the Eóganacht and others.Eastwards, across the River Barrow, lay the
Laigin (later Leinster) and to north of them, in what became Meath (Mide: the middle), the kingdom of the
Southern Uí Néill, with kings usually drawn from the Clann Colmáin.West of the southern Uí Néill was the
confederate kingdom of Connacht.The
region to the north was divided from east to west between the confederacies of
the Ulaid (whence Ulster), Airgíalla and the Northern Uí Néill.I have used the term confederacy to represent
the loose realms ruled by a Rí Ruirech
(a king over kings).The title was
usually competed for between branches of royal houses from different kingdoms.[13]

Part 1: Preliminary Analytical Points

a: Ethnicity and ethnic ascription

Ethnic identification remains a hotly
debated topic in late antique archaeology.The problem reaches back to the early twentieth century and the
development of the notion of the archaeological ‘culture’, defined by pottery
and other artefacts, house-types, burial styles and so on repeatedly occurring
together in a particular region.Such
‘cultures’ could be categorised by material cultural features (e.g. the prehistoric
‘Beaker Folk’) or by a type-site (such as Hallstadt for the Iron age culture).These are acceptable ways of organising data;
the problems arose when cultures were believed to represent actual peoples and
their spread or decline to mark conquest or absorption of, or by, other
peoples.[14]

By the second quarter of the
twentieth century Roman- and Germanic-Iron-Age Cultures (henceforth capitalised
for clarity) were normally identified with historically-attested peoples.In the 1920s, for example, a series of
volumes by Nils Åberg discussed the archaeology of the Anglo-Saxons, Franks,
Ostrogoths and Visigoths.[15]Early medieval ‘barbarian’ peoples were
essentially defined by their metalwork, above all by their jewellery.This contrasts with Early-Roman-Iron-Age archaeology
in Germania Magna, where pottery
types were often used to identify different Kulturgruppen
between the Rhine and Scandinavia.[16]Sometimes linking Culture and people is a reasonable
working hypothesis, as with the ‘North Sea Coast’ Culture and the Saxon
confederacy, or perhaps the Przeworsk Culture and the Vandals.[17]In other areas, the reverse side of the coin is
encountered.The ‘problem of the Picts’
discussed in a classic 1955 edited volume was, largely, that they had no Culture.[18]Apart from the enigmatic symbol stones, the
Picts seemingly had no archaeological manifestation.Finally, some culture groups were defined
essentially by the unsophisticated expedient of labelling a particular area’s archaeology
according to the ethnic group known from written sources to have occupied the
region during the centuries in question.The best example is the Černjachov-Sintana-de-Mureš
Culture associated with the pre-migratory Goths. This meets none of the strictly
archaeological requirements of a Culture, being (as, most notably, in its
‘mixed-rite’ cemeteries) a mélange of influences and characteristics.The claimed spread of the Culture (and thus,
allegedly, of Gothic people) is even argued from absences: weapons are not
(always) placed in burials.[19]This argument would be ruled out of court in
any discipline that followed the rules of logic.The concept of the Culture far surpassed its
analytical utility.

Linking a Culture to ethnicity is
problematic.The principal difficulty
comes from assuming that ethnicity leaves a passive archaeological manifestation.Ethnicity is a question of belief – in one’s
own group or groups’ reality and/or in the difference of others.Objects, naturally, can have no ethnic
identity; no ethnic ascription can emerge from a purely archaeological reading
of the material.[20]Material culture can be manipulated to convey
signs about ethnicity or other group identities.Pottery, for instance, can reveal attitudes
to food production and beliefs about cooking, often part and parcel of the ideas
making up a belief in a particular group-identity. However, the relationship between material
culture and ethnicity – even where it exists – is complex.Moerman’s classic study revealed that members
of the South-East Asian Lue could list a series of characteristics which they
felt defined their group.When scrutinised,
however, it emerged that many of these features were very rarely observed any longer
or were used by neighbouring groups too.[21]Pohl has revealed a similar state of affairs
in post-imperial Europe.[22]Larrick recorded the African Loikop Samburu
belief that different spearheads had associations with neighbouring peoples,
and to convey the ethnic characteristics (bravery, cunning, etc.) thought to typify
those peoples. They were, however, used within
Loikop society to signify different age-grades.[23]This would play havoc with any attempt to map
ethnic groups from the archaeological distribution of spearheads. Material
culture associated with one group could clearly be used to emphasise other
forms of identity among its neighbours.The Late Roman army’s adoption of features such as trousers to express
the ferocity supposedly characteristic of barbarians is one example.At a different level of society, slaves’
shaggy hooded cloaks were said to be barbarian (like many slaves themselves).[24]Among the barbarians, Roman imports were
employed to denote social and political status and power.[25]It is perfectly possible that other material
cultural forms crossed ethnic boundaries in analogous fashion.For a secure ethnic identification of
material cultural traits we need reliable written sources; throughout late
antiquity, barbaricum produced none
of these.The only documentary accounts
are external, Graceo-Roman ones.The nigh-insurmountable
problems involved in using these sources to discuss barbarian society are well-known,
if not always acknowledged.[26]

It has been insufficiently
acknowledged that ethnicity is multi-layered.[27]A fourth-century barbarian warrior from North
Sea Coastal Germania might have been
treated as a Saxon by the Romans and adopted this confederate identity in
particular circumstances.Among Saxons,
however, he might have stressed a lower-level ethnic identity, perhaps ‘Angle’,
‘Jute’ or ‘Frisian’.These groups are
attested before the appearance of the Saxon confederacy, and again after the fifth-century
crisis.They were probably subsumed
within the confederacy but this does not imply their ‘disappearance’ or
‘reappearance’, still less testify to ‘incomplete assimilation’.[28]It rather suggests such identities’ reordering
according to their perceived political value.Similar processes may have occurred among the Pictish confederacy, where
several early Roman peoples reappear in the post-imperial era, and among the migratory
and later Goths.[29]Crises among larger groups are often marked
by the reappearance of other ethnicities, presumably existing previously beneath
the confederate identity.Thus, if
material culture related to ethnicity it is now impossible to detect which
level of identity that was.

The spread of material culture
might imply an expansion of ethnic or political identity, if we can plausibly link
the former with the latter, but the Lue and the Loikop examples give us pause
for thought.A growth in the area
covered by a Culture could imply
population movement but it need not. Political ascendancy could lead to the
adoption of the dominant group’s cultural forms by subordinated leaders,
demonstrating the new roots of their power, but with few if any people changing
location.Goods also move with trade and
exchange; the frequent discovery of Roman artefacts’ in barbaricum – which naturally does not reveal Roman migration and
settlement – constantly reminds us not to assume that the movement of material necessarily
implies a migration of people.A repeated
problem in the historical use of archaeology is the reading of material that
spreads in the ‘right’ direction – that suggested by the traditional ‘barbarian
migrations’ narrative – as revealing population movement, whereas the diffusion
of cultural artefacts in the ‘wrong’ direction – in a direction running counter
to the historical narrative – is read as representing trade or exchange.[30]

The archaeological record is not
produced by chance but as the result of deliberate choice by historical actors.[31]Thus migration will only be archaeologically
detectable where the migrants chose
to make themselves visible in the material cultural record.This is by no means commonplace.Most late antique migrations are
archaeologically invisible.Between the
first and fourth centuries many thousands of people moved from barbaricum into the Roman Empire,
leaving no almost material trace at all.The few archaeological signs of late antique population movements relate
primarily to the Anglo-Saxon migration and some short-distance drift across the
Rhine.

The extent to which even a rigorously-defined
archaeological ‘culture’ matches an identifiable ethnic or political group or
the movement of the latter is strictly limited.As a default position, straightforward one-to-one correlations should be
treated as inherently implausible.This
critically-aware stance remains uncommon in the Late Antique archaeology of the
northern peoples, where crude ethnic ascriptions persist.

b: Banded barbaricum

The interpretation presented in
this chapter draws heavily upon the idea of a roughly ‘banded’ barbaricum.[32]This is not presented as a hard and fast
‘fact’ but as a means of structuring and interpreting the data. As such it
provides a framework, which can be refined, corrected or rejected with new
research.We might initially imagine barbaricum as three bands.Closest to the limes, contacts with the Empire were dense and frequent.This band has been called a ‘buffer zone’ but
this term is predicated upon the notions of a natural hostility between the Empire
and its neighbours and of an automatic barbarian desire to invade imperial
territory (hence the need for a ‘buffer zone’).[33]I will instead call this the ‘frontier
band’.Behind this was territory where
contacts with Rome were less frequent, possibly more structured and more
politically important.The proportion of
higher-value Roman artefacts to other imports is often higher.I will term this the ‘intermediate
band’.Furthest away was the ‘outer
band’, where contact with Rome was scarcer.

This schema requires caveats.It is immediately complicated by seaborne
trade, which could bring Roman goods in some quantity and with steady frequency
to areas far from the limes, like
Denmark.It is also more analytically
descriptive than geographically predictive; there is no algorithmic
relationship between geographical distance from the frontier and the ‘band’
within which a settlement is found.Some
sites within the fourth-century ‘Saxon homelands’ manifest relationships that
would enable their consideration almost as a frontier region.Limited contacts with the Empire mean,
conversely, that Ireland never shows ‘frontier band’ archaeological
characteristics, even though no territory intervenes between the island and Rome’s
British provinces.At a micro level,
relationships can change over much shorter distances.Coastal ‘terps’ (see below) show steady
relationships with the Empire, whereas those only slightly further inland
reveal few or no Roman connections.[34]

The interpretation of Roman imports
is also important.[35]There were many means by which objects could enter
barbaricum: straightforward commerce,
more or less as we would understand it today; diplomatic payment or gift; loot;
the property of barbarian soldiers returning home after serving the Empire; and
so on.We must also examine potential
differences between the means by which objects were brought to barbaricum and
the ways in which they were distributed thereafter.A barbarian leader might control a port of
trade, to which Roman goods were brought in commercial transactions, but then
distribute these to his followers as gifts.Before making confident statements close analyses are required of
distribution patterns, the dating of material and the contexts within which
objects are found; fine decorated Roman tablewares found in rubbish pits in
settlements suggest very different contacts, and social use, from the same
ceramics found in exceptional, lavishly-furnished burials.

The blanks and dense spots on
distribution maps necessitate other caveats when using archaeological data on a
regional scale.These can, in various
times and places, show the different levels of archaeological interest in types
and periods of settlement.They can also
reflect geographical and ecological differences; blanks might represent ancient
forest or mountains, or zones of heavy industrialisation and urbanism
destroying evidence without record.Intensive agriculture might eradicate archaeological evidence without it
being recognised.Conversely, especially
in more recent times, ploughing can distort the map producing large numbers of
chance finds.Sometimes a bias exists towards
recognising some sites rather than others; furnished inhumation cemeteries,
lavish bog-deposits or hoards have long been noted because valuable objects
would be reported and sold when revealed by ploughing or building.Private and museum collections were often
built on such finds[36].
Other sites would not be as observable.That leads to the key variable: the ephemeral nature of many types of
site in barbaricum.Most settlements were built of wood, thus
requiring a certain level of archaeological competence for their recognition.In some regions, the dead were disposed of in
unfurnished and un-urned cremations, making cemeteries all but invisible.Some forms of house-building leave few or no
traces, even where excavation techniques are quite advanced.Deep pits for rubbish-disposal and a general
‘cleanliness’ of sites will render them extremely difficult to find, even
today, via field-walking or chance.One
also needs to take account of the precise context within which finds were
discovered – whether as rubbish in settlement sites or deliberately placed in
burials for example – and this contextual information is often lacking.Everything we say must be taken as
provisional and liable to modification.

c: The interlinking of imperium
and barbaricum

This chapter contends that we
should stop seeing the Roman Empire and the barbarian territories as opposed
and confronting worlds – implicit in the term ‘buffer zone’ for example.By the time of the Tetrarchy the inhabitants
of Ireland, northern Britain and Germania
Magna[37]had beenneighboursof amilitarily-
and culturally-dominant world power for 250 to 300 years.Military confrontations certainly occurred
between the Romans and their neighbours[38]
but we should remember that hostile encounters were never the only – and rarely
the normal – form of interaction along the limes.They were only one aspect of a complex
network of diplomatic relations.[39]

The expression of high status in
fourth-century barbaricum is
invariably coloured by Roman ideas.For
barbarians the emperor was the fons et
origo of real power.Historians and
archaeologists have been wont to transfer comments on Germanic kingship from Caesar’s
and Tacitus’ works (problematic though these texts are even for their own
period) to the late Roman era but there is little evidence to suggest that
these concepts persisted so long.We do
not know how Roman idioms and objects were translated in their use by
non-Romans but we cannot now identify any distinctively barbarian ideas of
rulership in the late imperial era.[40]

The Alamans, for example,
produced brooches that clearly imitated those issued to imperial officials.Possibly manufactured on high-status Höhensiedlungen (see below), they these
may have been issued to royal followers as signs of status.In north-western Germania, Roman military metalwork was buried quite frequently in
the cremation cemeteries of the ‘Saxon homelands’.Clearly, the families of Saxons who returned
home after serving in the Roman army could think of no better way of
symbolising the deceased’s prestige than to cremate them in their old uniform
or publicly inter their ashes alongside badges of their imperial service. In the same part of the world, around 400, a
wooden chair was included in a prestigious burial.This was carved with designs based upon the
‘chip-carved’ ornament that decorated official imperial metalwork.Copies of Roman coins were made in
Scandinavia.[41]

The frontier band of barbaricum was saturated with Roman material
cultural influence.At the site at the Oespeler
Bach near Düsseldorf (D) imports of all sorts were found.[42]Even in areas quite far from the frontier, trans-Rhenan
craftsmen had imitated Roman products since the early Roman period.By the fourth century, the ‘frontier zone’ of
Germanic-speaking barbaricum might be
seen as northern Gaul’s economic hinterland.Exports of Argonne ware are frequent there and bronze vessels evidently
made on the Meuse were exported as far as Norway.Study of northern British artefacts shows
similar patterns, especially but not only immediately beyond Hadrian’s
Wall.In the late Roman period,
influences from the Empire seem to have begun to penetrate Irish politics and
society and perhaps became a significant engine of social change (see below).[43]This influence did not only take artefactual form.The appearance in Germania of inhumation, the standard fourth-century provincial
Roman burial rite, has long been recognised as indicating imperial
influence.Inhumation appeared in
northern Britain too, probably in a similar cultural imitatio imperii.[44]Although approaches driven by the traditional
‘barbarian migration’ narrative have frequently argued that the Roman-barbarian
frontier was deepening into the Empire, when read on their own terms the
archaeological data are unambiguous in showing the opposite: the increasing ‘Romanisation’
of barbaricum.This should in no way surprise us.

‘Career migration’ into the
Empire was, as mentioned, a standard feature of barbarian life.The late Roman army may or may not have
recruited more barbarians than before but, with the separation of civil and
military service, the opportunity for non-Romans to rise high in the army was
certainly greater.[45]Alamans and, later, Franks did very well in
the fourth-century military. One Frank, Bauto married his daughter to Emperor
Arcadius and another, Arbogast, briefly (388-94) became the dominant western leader.[46]The Empire continued to intervene in
barbarian politics, paying large sums to barbarian groups to keep others in
check and periodically launching military operations.Diplomatic payments became extremely
important in politics beyond the limes.Setting up and knocking down barbarian
leaders remained essential to Roman frontier policy.As had been the case since the late Republic,
losing barbarian factions tended to move to imperial territory for security.That north-western barbaricum was a periphery of the Roman Empire and the dynamics involved
in this relationship are hugely important in understanding fifth-century
history.[47]